PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: Australia's landscape has inspired artists for generations. But dedicated landscape artists have apparently fallen out of fashion in the fickle world of fine art. That hasn't stopped a dedicated group of painters who go bush a few times a year to work plein-air, or in the open air, following in the footsteps of some of the nation's famous artists.

ARTIST: Being an open-air outdoor painter, the thing that grabs me, has always really grabbed me, is the light and that's really what gets me going in the landscape, it's the light. It's all about - any subject'll do me if there's a light falling on it that looks good.

ARTIST II: If it's an early morning light on a river, for instance, if you can capture that by being there and have a viewer then come along and get that cold, misty feeling, you know, a bit of a shiver up their spine when that first ray of light comes through a cold fog, you know. If you can capture that and translate it so that other people can feel that, then you've done a good job.

ARTIST III: My idea of it all is my feeling of beauty, to capture beauty. To me, beauty is light on a certain object and the landscape, different seasons of the landscape. That sort of thing is what I'm more about.

SEAN MURPHY, REPORTER: They call themselves the Australian Plein-Air Group, landscape painters who gather a few times a year to camp out and paint outdoors. They're following in the footsteps of the Heidelberg School, legends of Australian art such as Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, whose late 19th Century work was the birth of Australian Impressionism.

It's not really a revival of the Heidelberg School; good landscape painting has never gone out of fashion. But for these artists, working plein-air is the key to really capturing the unique light, vegetation and colours of the Australian bush.

KASEY SEALY, ARTIST: It's a similar thing to probably what they did. A lot of artists in history went out in the field to capture the light, get inspiration, ideas, that sort of thing. Yes, it's probably an extension of that.

SEAN MURPHY: Kasey Sealy is one of Australia's best landscape painters and a founding remember of the Plein-Air Group.

KASEY SEALY: We're all like-minded people and we appreciate what all of us do and what all of us put in to the group. It's a mixture of people, like professional to keen amateurs, which doesn't matter, you know, it's just that like-minded people get together and fun and camaraderie and all people from interesting backgrounds. Learning from nature, painting from nature and that sort of thing is the inspiration behind it. Light, you know, light is the thing you're trying to capture, light and atmosphere in your paintings. I love this sort of - in Autumn, when all the grasses go into the greys and golds and it's probably more true Australiana to me. Like, I always think the Australian flag should be blue and gold not blue and green, 'cause to me, true Australia's golden, like it is here, you know, the gold and then the blue hills and blue sky.

SEAN MURPHY: In the cool pre-dawn, Brett Garling is up and chasing the light before it even appears on the horizon. He reckons the dynamic light of sunrise and sunset is hardest to capture, but brings the most rewards.

BRETT GARLING, ARTIST: You've probably got five or ten minutes. You've got to be super fast. And at times you've got to have a little bit of a photographic memory because the light changes so rapidly that you can be looking down to mix a colour that you've just seen, look up, and the colour's gone. So in a respect you've got to have that sort of - develop a photographic mind as to the image you want, you looked at it, that inspired you, stay with that.

SEAN MURPHY: Brett Garling is better known as one of Australia's best sculptors, but he also loves to paint.

Which do you prefer?

BRETT GARLING: Horses for courses. There's things that I can't accomplish with clay. I can't describe the feeling I get from a landscape through clay. And vice versa. I can't describe the movement of a horse or a person running through paint.

SEAN MURPHY: Like most of his colleagues, the attraction of the Plein-Air Group is the opportunity to work alongside great painters in a supportive environment.

BRETT GARLING: It's a camaraderie thing as well. But it's very much a learning curve. I've never come away from a trip yet where I haven't thought, "Wow, I've learnt something new today and this trip's been great." You know. "I've learnt something about colour or perspective or tone or composition." And having older members in the group too is great because they bring with them this wealth of knowledge that they've accumulated and that they've accumulated from their mentors and passing on. So it's a real learning group too.

SEAN MURPHY: At 75, Doug Sealy is the Plein-Air group's oldest member. He's been a professional painter for 50 years and his work has won multiple awards. But like many oil painters, he's developed a serious allergy to turpentine and now can only work with watercolours.

DOUG SEALY, ARTIST: And 'cause I used to splash turps around, get turps on my hand, didn't wash it, didn't wipe it off, didn't know about the allergies. And of course then when it hit me, it took a while to find out what it was. And by that time I was covered in blisters. And so I had to give it up for three years and they said if it came back again after three years, I'd have to give up oil painting altogether. And that's how I kicked into watercolours, 'cause I had a family to feed so I had to earn money, so then I taught myself watercolours.

SEAN MURPHY: Is it more challenging capturing a landscape with watercolours?

DOUG SEALY: Oh, you bet. Yeah, I mean - well, the one I'm working with today, the air's been so dry that I haven't been able to use the technique that I like doing best and that I envisaged when I started the picture. And so it's turned into a sort of semi-mess. It's still alright, but it's not - it's disappointing for me. So you can't just - like, with oil paintings, you just scratch it and work over it, but with watercolours, you just get another sheet of paper and start over. And so that's - that's a problem, and as the picture gets more advanced, you've got the chance of dropping colour where it shouldn't be, in the sky, something like that, picture's ruined. You can't wipe it off, so you gotta start again.

SEAN MURPHY: During its week-long stay in the Dubbo region, the Plein-Air painters help promote RiverSmart conservation while bringing their work to the public on the Macquarie River. The group hopes to do more public painting on future trips to help promote an art form which they say has been devalued by the art world.

BRETT GARLING: Landscape painting, as all art did, went off the boil for a while there where there was all this "find yourself" type art come in and throw paint at walls and isn't it wonderful what a mark that made? And that's all well and good. And, you know, the adage was, "Oh, not another bloody gum tree painting." Have you have seen a good one painted though?

DOUG SEALY: There's a sort of system and there's a system that works around the world where a lot of these people come out of a university system and they get into the positions of power and they push their one agenda. Where, you know, our agenda is more like an undercurrent of we just go and do it, we really have nothing to do with that side of the art world.

SEAN MURPHY: Todd Whisson has a foot in both camps. He's been a full-time professional painter for 10 years, but just enrolled in a Fine Arts degree at Queensland's Griffith University.

So you're known for Impressionist-style work, but what you're doing there is abstract.

TODD WHISSON, ARTIST: Yes, that's right. It's almost like two audiences, basically. People often like one or the other. What I'm looking for is really the same Impressionism, which is to be inspired and moved by the feeling of what's in front of me. So it could be the light, it could be the colour, could be the movement, could be the shadows. There's no particular thing. It's just on the day.

SEAN MURPHY: And while they may debate the merits of abstract art or Impressionism around the nightly camp fire, laughter sets the tone. Ultimately, they're bonded by the quest to chase the light and try to capture the beauty of the Australian bush.

And there's still plenty of support for their work. Warwick Fuller was this year invited to be the official artist for Prince Charles' Australian Royal Tour.

WARWICK FULLER, ARTIST: I just travelled with the official entourage and painted when I could. Quite often we'd stop somewhere for 20 minutes and I did a few pencil sketches, that sort of thing. After I got back home and tidied up some of the work, they selected - well, the Prince selected three paintings and purchased those, which was a real bonus, to go into his collection. And in fact I gave him a painting as a gift in thanks. He paid for my tour out of his own personal funds and so, yeah, I thought that was a real honour.

SEAN MURPHY: Royal patronage is just another accolade in a decorated career for Warwick Fuller. The recognition is nice, but it's the work that drives him and the other Plein-Air painters.

WARWICK FULLER: What I'm attempting is to paint the light. It sounds easy, but it's - I've only been trying for 35 years and I'm hoping to get a good one soon. But it's a very elusive sort of a thing to really capture it. You can make a light colour on a dark object and call it light, but light is all-encompassing. It's in the air, it's on objects. It's a very difficult and elusive thing to capture and that's what really drives me.

PIP COURTNEY: Sean Murphy there. And congratulations to Sean, who's the toast of the rural journalism world this week, after winning the international Star Prize for Rural Broadcasting. He won the video category for Freedom of Choice, an in-depth look at a landmark contamination case in Western Australia involving GM canola. It's the fourth year in a row a Landline reporter has won the award.

Congratulations too to Landline reporter Prue Adams, named runner-up in the international Yarra Award for Environmental Reporting.